Today we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, so like a lot of other schools, we enjoyed a school holiday.  I spent most of the weekend designing lesson plans and checking my Twitter feed, and I found some jewels.  This video by Kid President is certainly worth watching:

This is another jewel I stumbled upon while searching for inspiration for the 4th and 5th grade Invention Projects.

The students will watch this video in Edmodo using the app called Educanon. Educanon allows the facilitator to embed questions in the video. The question will appear and the video is paused until the viewer answers it. This is my first experience using Educanon, but I think it is going to be a very useful way to assign videos for individual viewing while still assessing the level of attention and understanding. I am really grateful that is free and is available in the Edmodo platform.

I found a few other resources that will help my students understand what is involved in the creation process and will enable them to begin asking the questions that lead to innovation and invention, like S.C.A.M.P.E.R. activities and some resources in the Texas Performance Standards Project. I added them as tiles to the Invention webmix in Symbaloo.

The last item I worked on was getting the lesson plan ready for the 3rd graders to create a Voki to embed in their blog.  Their Voki will remind viewers of the ten things students do not share online without their parents’ permission.  The instructions for the project are in the Moodle course where they take their Web License Test.